I am a Cowboy

After reading Captain Ed's WaPo piece I thought I was one of the Loyalist Army, but after reading this from Big Lizard, I realize I am a Cowboy: .... I talked about the fourth class of conservatives, what I called the Cowboys. These are intelligent but non-intellectual (even anti-intellectual) folks who don't try to articulate their conservativeness... they simply live it. I noted that Bush belongs to this class, rather than to the Loyalist Army, the Rebel Alliance, or the Trench-Dwelling Dogfaces, all of whom at least have pretensions to being intellectuals. The Cowboys very much distrust intellectuals because they believe those eggheads can talk themselves into believing anything.... there is a very special kind of person found almost exclusively among the Cowboys. For want of a better word, I'll call this sort a Gipper. A Gipper (Ronald Reagan is the prototypical example) is a person who doesn't need to logically reason his way to rightness, because he has an instantaneous intuitive understanding of right and wrong.

That makes a lot of sense. I thought I was a member of the Loyalist Army, but while I am still loyal to GWB, I relize that I am a Cowboy.

Despite so many of Reagan's friends and mentors falling for the Communist line, and despite the fact that Reagan was a New-Deal Democrat, Ronald Reagan never once, not even for a moment, had anything but absolute contempt and loathing for Communism and its kid-sister Socialism. He started fighting the Communists in the 1940s, during the war, while even FDR himself was pedaling the line that "Uncle Joe" Stalin was an enlightened, progressive, scientific, and democratic leader.... Reagan happened to be an excellent writer, but he never thought of himself as an intellectual. His genius was first in seeing the right, then in being able to explain it in terms that were not only universally understandable but extraordinarily persuasive. Buckley made conservatism respectable, but it took Reagan to make it popular. Anybody who knew Reagan for any length of time knew that, no matter what compromise he was forced to accept due to circumstances, Reagan would never, ever "drift to the left," "grow in office," or accept the nearly universally held postulate that Socialism was the way of the future, and the New Soviet Man was the future of Mankind. Since everyone reading this far is probably both intelligent and pretty intellectual, I predict that you're way ahead of me. George Bush knows Harriet Miers extremely well; he clearly believes that she is not only a Cowgirl but also has an uncanny knack for immediately knowing the right thing to do (from Bush's point of view). George Bush sees Miers as a female Ronald Reagan: to him, she is a Gipper.

The reason he believes that she will never be seduced by intellectual arguments for judicial activism is that she has that eerie ability to cut through the crap and see the true, ignoble self of the Left. And he believes that she knows what is the right thing to do and can articulate it to the other justices in their conferences before they vote. Bush would argue that it's a thousand times more valuable to be able to persuade one or two justices to her way of thinking -- than simply to write a brilliant, erudite, and scathing dissenting opinion, as Antonin Scalia so often does....

That makes a lot of sense.

Of course I don't know if Bush is right about Harriet Miers; I don't know the woman. But I now believe he is right about the basic approach -- there should be at least one person on the Court who is not an intellectual and has a natural immunity to the soulless absurdities that intellectuals can so readily rationalize. The Supreme Court needs a Gipper to slap the other justices across the face and say "snap out of it!"

antimedia blogged If conservatives lose sight of the big picture — the 2006 elections, then it won't matter who is confirmed to the Court. You may not think you care about that now, but with the Senate teetering on the edge due to the "gang of 14", minor losses in 2006 would make the possibility of another conservative justice being nominated and confirmed (if an opening occurs) even less likely than it is now.

Bill Faith blogged don't really want to see the Republican Party or the Conservative movement damaged, but it's too late for that. It's time for Congress to whop W upside the head with a clue-by-four and remind him he's just a President, not a King.

If by that you are suggesting defeating Miers, that would be stupid, unless you really want the Attorney General to replace her.

Maybe once he starts paying attention he can be shown the error in his ways in other areas, such as illegal immigration and his tendency to spend the public's money like a drunken sailor.